


Mercy

by Lise



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Developing Relationship, Discorporation (Good Omens), Gen, Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt Not Really Comfort, M/M, Mercy Killing, Nebulous Canon, POV Aziraphale (Good Omens), Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Temporary Character Death, What am i doing honestly, for the subject matter it's shockingly non dark, the one where Aziraphale realizes he's having feelings in the worst way possible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 11:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20692775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lise/pseuds/Lise
Summary: Millennial fever strikes. Crowley gets caught in the middle. Aziraphale just wanted to make off with some illuminated manuscripts.





	Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> This is one hundred percent [Lena's](http://portraitoftheoddity.tumblr.com) fault, as so many things are. I mean, it's also my fault, but it was her idea. I just borrowed it. 
> 
> Thank you ever so much to [my ever wonderful beta](http://ameliarating.tumblr.com), who edits things even when they're only sort of her fandom. Come talk to me about Good Omens and how much fun it is to make your favorite characters suffer on [Tumblr.](http://veliseraptor.tumblr.com)

In the summer of the Year of Our Lord 1000, there was a false alarm, brought about by millennial fever both Up and Downstairs, that the Apocalypse was imminent. It wasn’t the sort of thing that _should _have happened, but it did, though fortunately the worst thing that happened was a scuffle that broke out just outside Baghdad. 

This was mostly not significant. The angels involved silently agreed not to mention the demon that slipped away. 

The Principality Aziraphale avoided the whole thing, safely ensconced in an abbey in Tuscany, plotting how he was going to nick one very nice illuminated manuscript from its library. He’d gotten the Summons, of course, thought about going, and decided against it. He was fairly certain the whole thing was a mix-up anyway. 

_Fairly _certain. He was somewhat concerned about the possibility that it wasn’t, and he was going to be in a great deal of hot water.

The abbey was generally a quiet place, which suited Aziraphale very well, and made it all the more alarming when shouting suddenly broke out. For a nervous moment Aziraphale thought _oh dear, the Apocalypse _has _arrived after all, _but he listened enough to hear that someone had apparently collapsed on the road and was currently being brought, bleeding profusely, to the infirmary.

Aziraphale sighed, looked longingly at the bestiary he was reading, and reluctantly stood to go see what could be done.

The last thing he expected was the identity of the unfortunate lying limply on one of the cots, ginger hair dark with sweat and skin alarmingly greyish. His eyes were closed, which was actually, in this case, a good thing. 

He was also making little wheezing noises that did not sound at all right.

“Oh, bother,” Aziraphale said. “This - well, this won’t do at all. Everybody - everybody, move along, just…” He snapped his fingers, and everyone in the vicinity suddenly remembered something they needed to do somewhere else, and forgot what they’d been doing before. Aziraphale waited until they were all gone to hurry over.

“Crowley,” he said. “What in _Heaven _were you thinking?” 

Crowley opened one dull yellow eye, barely, and said, “gglgh.”

“Oh _dear,_” Aziraphale said. “You shouldn’t - it probably isn’t very good for you to be in here, is it? Let’s just…get you back outside, would that help?” 

Crowley gave him a miserable look that eloquently communicated _do I look like I’m going to be walking very far, you ass _as well as _did you not just hear me gargling my own blood._

“Why haven’t you _fixed _yourself,” Aziraphale said, a little peeved. “This is all so unnecessarily dramatic-”

Crowley coughed up a bit of blood and said, “can’t.”

“So if you’d just go on and - I’m sorry?” 

Crowley’s eyelids fluttered. Aziraphale looked at him, and then _looked _at him, and - ah. He saw the problem. 

There was a particular look to a wound left by a blesséd blade. On the right planes, it shone with holy light, and on a demon that light didn’t just stay confined to the wound itself. It spread like poison, not that anyone in _Heaven _would have made that comparison. No, it was all ‘purifying’ and ‘cleansing’ and not ‘chewing holes in demonic substance.’ 

Which was what Aziraphale was looking at now. A great, big, puncture wound that went right through Crowley’s stomach.

“What in heaven did you _do?_” Aziraphale exclaimed.

“More - what heaven did to me,” Crowley said. He looked woozy, and his yellow eyes were glassy and dull, slit pupils enlarged. “Wrong place. Wrong time.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, and then, “you’re - it really doesn’t look good.”

“Doesn’t feel so nice either,” Crowley said. His eyes closed slowly and then opened again. 

Aziraphale shook himself and stepped forward, raising his hands. “Well - I don’t expect anyone’s paying much attention right now, considering the mix-up with the dates, can’t hurt for me to just-”

“No no no,” Crowley said, shrinking away, as much as he could shrink away without moving much. “Abso_lute_ly not, angel, what do you think working a blessed _miracle _on a wound like this is going to do?” He stopped talking, gasping and looking like he regretted saying that many words in a row.

Aziraphale blinked. “Oh,” he said again. He hadn’t thought of that. He checked again.

He really didn’t look good. 

“Then what - why did you come here?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady, because he was very much worried about the answer and rather hoped Crowley would say _just needed a place to kip while I fix up, thanks._

Crowley wheezed a few times, gurgled, and spat up something black and oozing that struck Aziraphale as ominous. “Ugh,” he said, and then, “so, thing is.”

Stop right there, Aziraphale said, but only in his head.

“Thing is,” Crowley said, “I could, um. Fix it. In Hell.”

“So why aren’t you there, then,” Aziraphale asked. He recognized that he sounded a little belligerent, but he thought he saw where all this was going and did not like it at all. 

Crowley made another noise Aziraphale interpreted as ‘gak.’ Then said, “Won’t work. If I’m tied to this, uh, corporation. It’s pretty well done for. Just need a bit of help. Um. Jumping ship.”

Yes, Aziraphale thought, he _had _seen where this was going.

“You want me to kill you,” he said flatly. 

“Discorporate,” Crowley said delicately, or it would have been delicate if he hadn’t broken off into hacking up another chunk of black ooze. On the ethereal plane, the ragged, bleeding hole through Crowley’s essence had rapidly grown to roughly the size of a toddler’s head, and his breathing was labored. 

“It’s the _same thing._” 

“Is not,” Crowley said. “Less...permanent. For one.”

“I’m still - it’s very similar! I’m not - I’m not _cut out _for that sort of thing.”

“Sure you are,” Crowley said. “You were a - ngh - heavenly warrior once, right? Just channel a bit of divine wrath and-”

“That’s _completely _different,” Aziraphale said. “You’re - _helpless._”

“Thanks,” Crowley said. 

“You are! And I - I don’t _want _to. Can’t you just, I don’t know. Do it yourself?” He recognized that his voice was a little too high, and that maybe he was being a bit silly. Crowley was right, after all. Discorporation was - well, it wasn’t _fun, _but it was hardly slow-annihilation-by-holy-weapon either. It was a reasonable request. 

But Aziraphale didn’t _want _to. He imagined smothering Crowley with a pillow, or cutting his throat, and felt ill.

“Can’t be sure it’d work,” Crowley said. “Not a sure thing. Probably not...time for a do-over.” His words were slurring together like the time they’d drunk an entire cask of wine together at Cana, and there were little shivers running through his body, and it wasn’t like Aziraphale hadn’t seen people die before but mostly they weren’t people he _knew._

He stood there frozen in place, dithering. He remembered killing one of the Fallen - _really _killing, the final kind - back in the War. Just one, but he’d frozen then, too. 

He’d never tried to figure out who it had been. 

“Angel, _please,_” Crowley said, and he sounded suddenly raw and not casual at all, and Aziraphale couldn’t think of a time he’d heard him sound quite like that. “It hurts, and I’m unraveling, and if there was ssomeone else I trussted I’d asssk them but there isssn’t.”

Like his eyes - lid-to-lid yellow, not even trying for human - the emerging hiss said almost more than anything how far gone Crowley was. Aziraphale swallowed hard. 

“I don’t want to,” he said in a small voice. 

“Yeah,” Crowley said. “I know. Don’t exactly. Want you to either. But _really _don’t wanna die.” His voice wobbled. “Them’s the...breaksss, I guess.”

This had not been on Aziraphale’s to-do list for the day. Or the week, or the month, or the millennium. But Crowley was rapidly getting paler and paler, and his substance was unraveling, and Aziraphale was fairly certain that before long there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do, and even freed from his corporation Crowley would be gone. _Really _gone, back into the nothingness they’d all been before God had made them.

His voice cracked a bit when he said, “what do I need to do?” 

* * *

They argued about method. Or, well, Aziraphale argued about method - stabbing left a mess, suffocation was too slow, poison wasn’t precise - until Crowley said “_lisssten, _angel, I don’t care what you do ssso long as you do it now,” though the last bit got lost in a garbled mouthful of the black ectoplasmic tissue.

“All right,” Aziraphale said. “All right,” and he wasn’t wringing his hands, he _wasn’t. _The easiest way, the simplest and fastest way was just to-

Aziraphale didn’t use his strength much. But he still had it, and he knew the theory of the thing even if he’d never actually _done _it. Enough that it was quite easy to snap Crowley’s neck and spinal cord. Crowley’s eyes opened wide in almost comical surprise, and two seconds later went dull.

Letting go and backing away from the bed, Aziraphale took a shuddery breath that was not, strictly speaking, necessary. He thought he might start shaking. He checked, just in case, but Crowley - the _real _Crowley, not his corporation - was gone.

Yellow eyes still stared at him though. In a few moments the corporation would crumble into dust. Bodies didn’t stick around without a demon, or an angel, to inhabit them. 

Aziraphale pressed a hand over his mouth, then dropped it. He felt a bit ill. “Calm down,” he told himself sternly. “It’s not as though you are _friends. _He’s a demon, for Heaven’s sake! And he’s not even _really _dead at all.”

At least, probably not. Aziraphale thought there’d still been enough time. But what if there hadn’t been, what if Crowley was really and truly _dead _and not coming back? They’d send a replacement, and they’d probably be awful and cruel and have no sense of style. 

_You’re being ridiculous._

He felt as though he might cry. The corporation on the bed was crumbling rapidly.

“He’ll be back,” Aziraphale said stoutly. “Before I know it, and bothering me, causing all kinds of trouble. Really I should try to enjoy the peace and quiet.” He reminded himself of the bestiary he’d left behind to come here, but oddly, there was little comfort in the thought.

* * *

Time passed, and Aziraphale did not see so much as a scale of Crowley. He told himself that his counterpart was probably just taking his time emerging from Hell (though he’d never been one to linger there), or off somewhere else, wiling away unrestrained by any angelic presence. 

He didn’t try to find him, though. He feared the idea of looking and not finding him.

The creeping doubt: maybe Crowley wasn’t coming back at all.

That idea made him feel...uncomfortable. _Upset. _He might have called it ‘mourning,’ but the idea of an angel mourning a demon was too appalling to contemplate. So he shunted it off to the side and tried not to think of Crowley at all.

Difficult, when he kept thinking _I have to remember to mention this to Crowley _altogether too often. He hadn’t realized how much he’d come to take Crowley’s presence for granted, even when he wasn’t _there._

And that just made Aziraphale more uncomfortable. It was clear, now, that he’d gotten altogether too familiar with the fiend. 

Perhaps it was for the best if they didn’t cross paths again, Aziraphale told himself. For both parties, Aziraphale told himself. Crowley was fine, just keeping his distance. It would probably be awkward anyway to see each other again after how their last meeting had ended. 

Angelic denial could be an extraordinarily powerful thing.

* * *

In 1107 in Dublin, Aziraphale was sampling a nice if rather homely stew when someone sat down at his table - though it was less a sitting down than a ‘throwing oneself, all limbs at once, into a chair.’

“What’s that, looks appalling,” they said, and Aziraphale choked on a piece of mutton. 

He blinked and stopped choking, just barely preventing himself from leaping to his feet. “Crowley!” he said, altogether too loudly. “It’s you!” And looking much the same, he noted with relief. He’d gotten quite used to this particular appearance. Several heads turned in their direction and Aziraphale hastily lowered his voice. “Heavens - where have you been? You might have dropped by to let me know it’d worked at the least, I’ve been quite - curious.” 

“Just got back,” Crowley said, and belatedly Aziraphale noticed that while Crowley was, indeed, corporate, he looked a bit worse for wear still. Not _dying, _obviously, just a bit thin, and not just in the spindly way of this corporation. 

“Just…? But surely the wait times aren’t _that _bad,” Aziraphale said. Crowley adjusted his dark glasses and slouched even further into the chair, glancing around the pub.

“What’s this place? Looks a little grubby for your style, angel.” 

“It’s rustic,” Aziraphale said primly. “And the shepherd’s pie is very- you’re changing the subject.” 

Crowley’s knee bounced a couple of times. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I am. Going to do something about it?” 

Aziraphale huffed, annoyed, but not really deterred. “Crowley.” 

Crowley tapped his fingers on the table and said, “bosses didn’t much like my skipping out on the Apocalypse, even if it wasn’t really,” he said, and shrugged. “Principle of the thing, I s’pose.” 

What does that have to do with, Aziraphale almost began to ask, and then put it together and said, “oh.”

“Yeah,” Crowley said. “It’s been fun. Anyway - thought I’d pop in. Say hi. And thanks.” 

“No need to thank me,” Aziraphale said quickly. “Please don’t, actually. Very - quite nasty business, wasn’t it?”

“One way of putting it,” Crowley said. He didn’t seem in a hurry to leave, Aziraphale noticed. Not like he was holding a grudge, though Aziraphale couldn’t have said why he’d thought he _would._ For a demon, Crowley didn’t seem to hold grudges very well at all, generally speaking. “All sorted now, though. Good as new.” His smile looked a bit off, but Aziraphale decided against mentioning it. 

Silence fell between them. Not the companionable sort, either, but an awkward sort of gap in conversation that Aziraphale felt he ought to fill but was not certain how. After a while Crowley sort of shifted.

“Well,” he said, “suppose I’d best be on my way. Wiling to do. Temptations to...tempt. You know how it is.” 

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, unable to quite keep from sounding disappointed. Crowley gave him a look like he was waiting for something, and Aziraphale added, “I can’t exactly wish you good luck.”

Crowley tapped his hands on the table and stood up. “Probably wouldn’t look right, would it,” he said, and Aziraphale thought he might be disappointed. “See you round, angel.” 

Aziraphale watched him go, holding in the urge to call after him. He wasn’t actually sure what he would _say. _It wasn’t as though - Crowley wasn’t his friend. Crowley was his nemesis, his opposite number, the opposition...well, not _leader, _more like ‘opposition henchperson.’ Just because Aziraphale had done him a sort of favor, just because Crowley had done Aziraphale a few good turns, just because they’d shared a meal here and there–

He stared down at his soup, picked up the spoon, and put it back down. Heaven help him, Aziraphale had _missed _him. And he was very, very glad he was back. 

Oh _dear._


End file.
